HolidayPaperturn - Flipbook - Page 36
A Booksellers Story
By C.G. Wolfe
Image Courtesy of James Cummins Bookseller
Warehouse Number 2, of
James Cummins Bookseller (JCB)
is as good a place as any to look
for a needle in the stacks. The
semi-subterranean vault in northwest New Jersey, houses just a
small portion of James Cummins9s stock of rare and first editions, but it9s still more books than
you9re liable to see outside of a
public or institutional library.
I was cataloguing an extensive
collection of Christmas books we
had purchased as part of a much
larger library and hoping to find a true first edition of Phillip Van
Doren Stern9s, The Greatest Gift. It was wishful thinking at best. Only
200 editions were printed by Stern at his own expense, when his
literary agent couldn9t find a publisher for his short story fantasy.
Stern signed or inscribed most of them and sent them out as
Christmas greetings to his friends and family in 1943.
Stern9s book was just a simple, unillustrated pamphlet in stapled
orange wrappers, and it9s painful for bibliophiles to imagine how
many of those humble first editions may have ended up in the
waste basket after the holidays with the rest of the Christmas cards.
But fortunately, one of them famously made it into the hands of
a Hollywood agent and Phillip Van Doren Stern9s story about a
forlorn bank clerk named George Pratt, who is granted the wish
of never being born, became the basis for Frank Capra9s 1946 holiday classic, It9s a Wonderful Life, now considered one of the greatest
films of all time.
Collectors will pay upward of $15,000 for Stern9s little, self-published pamphlet but I was in it for the hunt. In JCB9s nearly 50
years as a premiere rare book dealer, we had never owned a true
first edition of The Greatest Gift, and I was about to give up hope
on ever finding one as I got to the end of our Christmas collection.
I had searched through every box but one. It was collecting dust
20-feet up, on the peak of the top shelf, in a precarious position
that I decided would require more acrobatic ladder work than it
might be worth 3 but it wouldn9t stop gnawing at me. At the risk
of breaking my neck, I finally hauled it down and started sifting
through it. I had come to the bottom of the box, when JCB
founder, Jim Cummins came down to see how the search was
going.
